It’s all good, their lives were worse than average anyway

All these raving mad techbro loonies keep ranting about how AI, unless properly nurtured (and paid for), might lead to extinction, and how AI ought to be a high priority for humanity (meaning “give us money), and it’s confusing, because they use words differently than normal people. In particular, the word “extinction” means something very different from what a biologist might understand it to mean.

When TESCREALists [transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism] talk about the importance of avoiding human extinction, they don’t mean what you might think. The reason is that there are different ways of defining “human extinction.” For most of us, “human extinction” means that our species, Homo sapiens, disappears entirely and forever, which many of us see as a bad outcome we should try to avoid. But within the TESCREAL worldview, it denotes something rather different. Although there are, as I explain in my forthcoming book, at least six distinct types of extinction that humanity could undergo, only three are important for our purposes:

Terminal extinction: this is what I referenced above. It would occur if our species were to die out forever. Homo sapiens is no more; we disappear just like the dinosaurs and dodo before us, and this remains the case forever.

Final extinction: this would occur if terminal extinction were to happen — again, our species stops existing — and we don’t have any successors that take our place. The importance of this extra condition will become apparent shortly.

Normative extinction: this would occur if we were to have successors, but these successors were to lack some attribute or capacity that one considers to be very important — something that our successors ought to have, which is why it’s called “normative.”

The only forms of extinction that the TESCREAL ideologies really care about are the second and third, final and normative extinction. They do not, ultimately, care about terminal extinction — about whether our species itself continues to exist or not. To the contrary, the TESCREAL worldview would see certain scenarios in which Homo sapiens disappears entirely and forever as good, because that would indicate that we have progressed to the next stage in our evolution, which may be necessary to fully realize the techno-utopian paradise they envision.

I think maybe “we” and “our” might mean something different to them, too, because the words don’t include me or my family or my friends or even distant acquaintances. Heck, they probably don’t include most of the life on this planet.

Later in his book, MacAskill suggests that our destruction of the natural world might actually be net positive, which points to a broader question of whether biological life in general — not just Homo sapiens in particular — has any place in the “utopian” future envisioned by TESCREALists. Here’s what MacAskill says:

It’s very natural and intuitive to think of humans’ impact on wild animal life as a great moral loss. But if we assess the lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average, which I think is plausible (though uncertain), then we arrive at the dizzying conclusion that from the perspective of the wild animals themselves, the enormous growth and expansion of Homo sapiens has been a good thing.

The lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average…who assesses that “worse”? People? TESCREALists? I was just watching an adorable little Theridion constructing a cobweb in a signpost — what was “worse” about that? It’ll probably thrive all summer long and leave behind a family of spiderlings who I’ll see building cobwebs next summer.

I don’t think the monarch butterflies and mayflies consider the expansion of Homo sapiens to be a good thing either — they’re dying and declining in numbers. Were passenger pigeons grateful for what we brought to them? I think MacAskill is playing a weird numbers game here. He thinks he can arbitrarily assign a value to an organisms life, either negative or positive or “average” (relative to what, I have no idea), and if it’s less than zero…pffft, it’s OK to exterminate them.

People who think that way about animals tend to eventually do the same thing to people, you know.

So where does this leave us? The Center for AI Safety released a statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.” But this conceals a secret: The primary impetus behind such statements comes from the TESCREAL worldview (even though not all signatories are TESCREALists), and within the TESCREAL worldview, the only thing that matters is avoiding final and normative extinction — not terminal extinction, whereby Homo sapiens itself disappears entirely and forever. Ultimately, TESCREALists aren’t too worried about whether Homo sapiens exists or not. Indeed our disappearance could be a sign that something’s gone very right — so long as we leave behind successors with the right sorts of attributes or capacities.

Again, the extinction they speak of is not the extinction we think of. If their strategies lead to the death of every person (and animal!) on the planet, but we leave behind blinking digital boxes that are running simulations of people and animals, that is a net win.

I’m beginning to worry about these people. If I assign them a value of -1, will they all conveniently disappear in a puff of smoke?

No wonder Tucker Carlson fell for it — UFOs are like the Tardis.

The attorney told DailyMail.com that one alleged recovery, recounted to him by a supposed crash retrieval program insider, involved a 30ft saucer partially embedded in the earth, with some fantastical properties.

‘They tried to hook a bulldozer to it to pull it out. And it pulled out a shape like a pie slice, almost like it was part of the way it was constructed,’ Sheehan said.

‘When it came loose a couple feet, they stopped immediately. They didn’t want to destroy the integrity of the machine.

‘They had a guy go into it. He got in there, and it was as big as a football stadium. It was freaking him out and started making him feel nauseous, he was so disoriented because it was so gigantic inside.

‘It was the size of a football stadium, while the outside was only about 30 feet in diameter.’

Sheehan said that space was not the only warped dimension around the craft.

‘He staggered back out after being in there a couple of minutes, and outside it was four hours later,’ he said. ‘There was all kinds of time distortion and space distortion.’

Oh yeah. I’m convinced. It was in the Daily Mail!

I bet you never thought you’d see me writing that, did you? Ham has always insisted on a rigidly applied set of doctrines that may not be questioned — any doubt about any one Christian claim will lead to the whole house of cards collapsing. The Washington Post demonstrates the validity of that argument with this article, The Revolt of Christian Homeschoolers.

It’s about a couple in Virginia, Christina and Aaron Beall, who were brought up in an ultraconservative faith, with all the usual restrictions: women will submit to the man, public schools were evil, contraception was bad (she got pregnant within weeks of getting married.)

Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.”

What broke their faith was that last bit: the rod. They could not beat their children. And if whupping their kids with a stick was wrong, what else could be wrong about their faith? So they enrolled their daughter in <gasp> public school. She thrived and was happy. And they discovered that their religion had lied to them about schooling.

“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”

They kept on learning.

Her loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement’s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.

Those people just happened to be her daughter and her husband.

The article says they didn’t question Christianity, so they didn’t become godless atheists or anything horrible like that, but they did become significantly more open-minded and are now reading more than the Bible and awful books like Bill Gothard’s or Michael and Debi Pearl’s. Now look at what they’re reading.

Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups.

Poor Ken Ham. He was right that any lapse in dedication to his interpretation of Christianity would lead to apostasy, but he’s probably sitting in a dark corner, hissing and gnashing his teeth and flicking his forked tail if he hears about the Bealls. One family has escaped his grasp!

Ken Ham was asked if Muslims are going to hell. His answer:

Well, it doesn’t matter if one is a Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Muslim, Methodist, Hindu, Sikh, Orthodox Jew, or any other denomination or religious group—if a person has not repented of sin and received the free gift of salvation offered through the Lord Jesus Christ (being “born again”), they will be separated from God for eternity in a place the Bible calls hell. And sadly, the majority of people will go there as Jesus warned, ‘Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many’ (Matthew 7:13).

Shorter Ken Ham: yes.

This one wins a prize for the dumbest creationist argument of the year.

Transcript down below.

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The loons are just making up numbers now.

Australia is going to “dramatically” increase in its wokeness in the next year, says The University of Austin Founding Fellow Peter Boghossian.

“If Stalin’s Soviet Union was a ten, and Portland Oregon is an eight, Australia is hovering around a three,” he told Sky News host Peta Credlin.

“However, I predicted that number will go up rather dramatically in the next year.”

He only gives Australia a three because the “toxic ideology” hasn’t had time to “metastasize” and “worm its way through the system.”

I’m not clear on how he used “reason to wake the woke,” as he claims, and I have no idea what weird diverticulum of his monstrously bloated colon he pulled those numbers out of. Where I come from, yanking out random numbers and pretending they’re authoritative is frowned upon. Or laughed at. Either response is appropriate here.